Is Shoppability Worth My IT Team’s Time?
Shoppability is a tool that many grocers are considering as it becomes an incremental offsite opportunity to drive traffic to digital properties, attract new and lapsed shoppers and increase clients’ media spend.
But becoming a retailer choice in shoppable buttons, ads and other content requires working with shoppable technology providers and carving out development time to create external facing product search and add-to-cart APIs. Here are some reasons why it’s worth it to dedicate IT and engineering resources to make offsite shoppability possible.
The Added Value of Ecommerce Traffic
Whether through shoppable content like recipes or contextual ads, shoppability enables retailers to drive traffic to their digital properties and enable passive incremental revenue and basket building. Retailers also have the chance to gain insight into user behavior and add-to-cart habits that offer a deeper understanding of how, where and what customers shop for. Orders often include multiple own brand products, ultimately benefiting grocery retailers’ profits.
$30 average basket value
10 average items added per recipe
Chicory’s shoppable recipe tech in particular powers over 5.4M recipes around the web and allows shoppers to add all of the ingredients they need to cook the recipe that they’re viewing into an online grocery cart. Among consumers, Recipe Activation, or Chicory’s shoppable recipes, garners the highest usership out of our suite of products. Consumers are 10x more likely to send products to basket and nearly 50x more likely to complete all steps to add to cart than they are when engaging with a shoppable ad, proving that recipes provide the perfect context for online basket building.
33% of traffic sent to a retail partner through Chicory’s Recipe Activation traffic was from new and lapsed shoppers.
Chicory’s recipe survey indicates that 80% of shoppers literally convert items in recipes into their shopping list that they use while making their purchases. And our recent omnichannel survey shows that 85% of online grocery shoppers are likely to buy the same things weekly and 80% are likely to repeat previous grocery shopping orders. This demonstrates that lifetime value can be high if CPG brands manage to actually make it into the digital cart in the first place and highlights the value of digital recipes in the grocery shopper’s decision to make a purchase.
Driving New and Lapsed Shoppers
By reaching shoppers looking for meal inspiration off of grocery websites, digital recipe sites provide an opportunity to drive offsite engagement with potential new and lapsed shoppers. Shoppable media placed in digital recipes reaches online shoppers during moments of grocery planning and high shopping intent, providing an ideal environment to promote retailer initiatives and educate consumers about online offerings, delivery methods or in-store promotions. Additionally, by connecting inspiration to purchase, retailers can increase own brand sales and engagement. Past Chicory campaigns have successfully driven incremental trips, larger basket size and value and add-to-carts of own brand products.
This incremental traffic from new and lapsed shoppers is a large part of the value that off-platform shoppable recipe engagement creates for retail partners. So long as retailers are able to partner with shoppability solution providers to share data, both teams can attribute sales and traffic to specific campaigns, creatives and activations.
Shopper Marketing Media
As shopper marketing efforts turn increasingly digital, retailer and brand shopper teams must find tactics to reach the online shopper and influence the ecommerce path to purchase. Shoppable media tactics offer shopper teams a new landscape through which they can promote the sale of products at a specific retailer.
Shoppability providers who have retail media partnerships can provide grocers the ability to offer recipe-based media as an approved tactic to extend their marketing efforts beyond the retailer environment. From offsite platforms, shopper teams can drive traffic to onsite product description pages, brand landing pages, coupons and directly to the digital shopping cart.
Ultimately, shoppability, when done correctly (check out our shoppability 101 and 102 guides here), offers retailers numerous benefits that outweigh the time and effort invested into implementing shoppability. Further, in order to better leverage this investment, many retailers are also opening up the use of their add-to-cart APIs to third party solution providers to increase traffic driven to their digital properties, and there are often additional use cases outside of the initial shoppable initiative that the development effort can support.
Proven Success
A major grocery retailer was looking for a way to promote its new online grocery pickup capabilities to online shoppers during their moments of grocery planning and shopping intent. Using Chicory’s in-recipe ad units and deterministic data, the retailer was able to reach shoppers during the moments they were looking at recipes and retarget those same shoppers around the web. Campaign creative and copy promoted the convenient new grocery pickup and delivery services. Chicory partnered with third party measurement provider, Commerce Signals, to analyze the sales impact of Chicory media.
Not only did the study show positive overall sales lift among Chicory-exposed shoppers, but it also showed that, over the course of the campaign, the Chicory shopper’s trip frequency and basket size increased.
1.21% increase in overall digital spend
$426K Incremental sales attributed to Chicory Media
$4.26 ROAS
Another major retailer recently worked with Chicory to make us an approved off-platform media partner. Integrating with Chicory in this way would allow CPG brands looking to run media supporting sales at this retailer to feature the store’s logo on their ads, and gain valuable insights measured through the retailer’s marketing arm. Ads drove users to product landing pages on the retailer’s site, where they could browse the brand’s offerings and easily build their cart.
After several months of working together, CPG usage of the new platform option exceeded expectations and drove considerable incremental revenue for the retailer, proving that Chicory’s shoppability strategy and tactics were a success.
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Nick Minnick is the Director of Strategic Partnerships here at Chicory, the contextual commerce advertising platform.
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